Crashed Plane Found In Afghanistan
NATO troops reached the wreckage of an Afghan airliner Monday, four days after it crashed into a snowy mountain peak, and began the gruesome task of searching for survivors among the 104 people on board, an alliance spokesman said.
Clear skies allowed helicopters to drop a small team of medics, mountaineers and explosives experts near the site, 20 miles east of Kabul, on Monday morning, an alliance spokesman said. There was no immediate word on what they saw.
"The weather is much better today, which allowed them to get to the top," Maj. Joseph Bowman said. "They're looking for survivors and trying to make the site secure" for more forces to join the operation.
The Boeing 737-200, flown by Kam Air, Afghanistan's first post-Taliban private airline, vanished from radar screens Thursday afternoon as it approached Kabul airport in a snowstorm from the western city of Herat.
NATO helicopters spotted parts of the wreckage some 11,000 feet up Chaperi Mountain on Saturday, but heavy snow and low cloud coverage had prevented alliance and Afghan forces from reaching the site by air or on the ground.
None of the passengers and crew, including more than 20 foreigners, are believed to have survived Afghanistan's worst air disaster.
The airline said the Boeing was carrying 96 passengers and six Russian and two Afghan crewmembers.
Three of those on board are believed to be American women working for Management Sciences for Health, a nonprofit group based in Cambridge, Mass., said William Schiffbauer, a company representative in Kabul.
The company identified the women as Cristin "Cristi" Gadue, 26, from Burlington, Vt., a 2000 graduate of Tufts University who lives in Kabul; Amy Lynn Niebling, 29, a native of Omaha, Neb., who now lives in Somerville, Mass.; and Carmen Urdaneta, 32, who lives in Brookline, Mass., and grew up in Topeka, Kan.
Turkey's government said Friday that nine Turks were aboard the missing plane. Six were employees of a Turkish road contractor, Gulsan-Cukurova, which is working on a U.S.-funded road project in the west, company manager Kurtulus Ergin said.
In Rome, the Italian Defense Ministry said one of the passengers was Capt. Bruno Vianini, who was assigned to a military-sponsored reconstruction project.
The last major plane crash in Afghanistan was on Nov. 27, when a transport plane under contract to the U.S. military crashed in central Bamiyan province, killing three American soldiers and three American civilian crew.
The most recent commercial crash was on March 19, 1998, when an Ariana Airlines Boeing 727 slammed into a mountain near the area being searched Friday, killing all 45 passengers and crew.